The first thing I noticed was that I suddenly lacked an outlet for the compulsion not to write.1 It wasn’t news to me that I used social media for procrastination purposes, but without it, I found myself lacking an easy source for distractions.
It dawned on me that I’d mostly stopped visiting websites directly and instead had been following the recommendations in my feeds to wherever they might lead me. My reading was no longer deliberate but curated by external forces that may or may no...